Travel.No Lonely Planet.

The best travel tales are...

The Penguin book of Indian Journeys

This brings together travel peices by the best. From Mark Tully's journey to Kumbh at Allahabad to R K Narayan's leisurely tour of Karnataka. The anthology brings together interesting travel tales from Vikram Seth to Khushwant singh and many others take you to places as familiar or remote as Jaipur and Ladakh.

Maximum City:Bombay Lost and found

Suketu does not call this city Mumbai.

This doesn't strictly fall into the category of travelogues but takes on Mumbai by interviewing dominant personalities of Mumbai. The book moves smoothly from the remote chawls of Mumbai to tours of Bollywood studios and stars an entir pantheon of politicans , bar-dancers, gangsters and even an engineer who gave up his lucrative career to become a poet.

Long Way Round:Chasing shadows across the world

If you are an ardent biker you will love this book though, even otherwise you will. Actors Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman travel the world around on their bikes.The book hilarious at times is a description of their take on the different cultures of the world they come across as they bike around. The book is full of pictures and maps.The journey has also been canned into a TV series and is aired on Discovery T&L on Sunday nights.

The Age of Kali:Indian Travels & Encounters

This is Dalrymple's take on the issues affecting the subcontinent.The Age of Kali symbolises dark times of lawless violence and political corruption.The book is dark as the theme suggests and includes his encounters with the LTTE in Sri Lanka and politicans in Bihar as he travles the sub-continent.

Road Fever

This one is for all adventure travel freaks.The exuberent and author of many-a-travel-books, Tim Cahill drives in a car from one end of the world to the other.The book concentrates more on the Americas and also details on the preaparation plans made by him for achieving this Guiness feat. On the hindsight, the book lacks in pictures and maps.

And then there are books by Bill Bryson and books that do not exactly fall into a category of travelogues but the city the story is set in plays an imprtant role and moves with the story like Khushwant Singh's Delhi and Pankaj Mishra's The Romantics.

And who can forget the magnificent Kerouac's On The Road and Guvera's Motorcycles Diaries.